


Ariadne

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2015-06-19
Packaged: 2018-04-05 04:05:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4165104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As he sits there, looking over his draft letter, he can't help but remember a story Steve once told him when they were kids. Odd that it should come back to him now, but oh well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ariadne

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been working on several other pieces, but this thing came to me pretty quickly and I thought I’d try getting it down while the iron was hot, so to speak. The idea of Bucky being drafted - the number he’s reciting to himself when Steve finds him in “The First Avenger” is, I believe, a draft number - always interested me. I guess that’s where this came from.
> 
> Comments, questions, and critiques are always welcome. Thank you for reading.

…

The letter comes, finally, as expected, and so James Buchanan Barnes takes his time about opening it because he already knows what it will say. 

He even knows what the header will be, and is not disappointed: “ _ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION,”_  capitalized and all in one breath like a printed telegram. Just above this is a somewhat more sedately-phrased request, no doubt intended for the office’s secretary:  _“Prepare in duplicate_.”

He doesn’t bother to look as he sits down, but fortunately the kitchen chair is there anyway. He runs a thumb along the draft letter’s creases.

There are dotted lines and blank spaces where the template has been fed into a typewriter, where it has been customized with his full name, his branch of service, his designated place and hour of reporting. 

And at the bottom, above the stamped signature, it informs him, “ _Willful failure to report promptly to this local board at the hour and on the day named in this notice is a violation of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 and subjects the violator to fine and imprisonment. Bring with you sufficient clothing for three days.”_

The whole thing reads with a kind of chilly, formal cordiality, an invitation to afternoon tea. James imagines a local board member sitting at his desk, pipe stuck firmly in his grouper-lipped mouth and his sleeves puffed out by yards of taffeta silk. 

_(”You are cordially invited to a thrilling and century-defining international event. Round-trip travel expenses paid in full.”)_

Hilarious.

And as James reads the letter over again (what will his number be now, something in the 30 million-range?), he’s reminded of a story Steve once told him.

They’d been nine and ten years old, apiece. Or maybe ten and eleven. (James usually marks time in his memory by how tall he can remember them both being, in relation to one another.) Steve had been going through a mythology phase, which is how Steve went about liking things when they were kids – in phases, in periods of segmented fanaticism, like epochs in a history book. The Age of Dinosaurs. The Astronomy Period. The Napoleon-and-Birdwatching Revival.

This time it had been the Greeks, with so much talk about severed genitalia and incest and bestiality and petty thievery that he’d been amazed the librarian let Steve walk out with the books. Steve had read some of these aloud, at night, sprawled on the couch cushions with a tubular flashlight tucked between his neck and shoulder.

And the stories had been interesting, mostly: Pandora’s Box, Daedalus and Icarus, Hercules and the Hydra, the Five Rivers of Hades. 

Their agreed-upon favorite, however, had been Theseus and the Minotaur.

A king named Minos  _(“No, Mi-nos,”_  Steve had repeated.  _“Midas is some other guy”)_  demands that each year, the city of Athens sends seven young men and seven young women to be devoured by a monster called the Minotaur. This is ostensibly to prevent a war with Crete, although for the purposes of the story it doesn’t really matter. Theseus, the Prince of Athens, eventually offers himself as a tribute. He’ll slay the beast, he tells his father Aegeus. He’ll put a stop to this sacrificial bull (shit).

_(”Hey.”_ Steve had aimed the flashlight at his face. _“If you can’t be serious for more than five seconds, I’m gonna stop._ _I’m not reading this for your a-moo-sement, you know.”)_

Aegeus consents, on the condition that black sails be raised on the ship traveling to Crete. If Theseus is successful, and manages to kill the Minotaur, he is asked to raise a set of white sails instead for the return journey: as a sign, Aegeus says. 

Theseus, of course, in the delirium of his own semi-inevitable triumph, forgets to do this, right after abandoning some poor girl on an island, which is not all that surprising given how the majority of men in classical mythology are bunch of goddamn pikers.

_(“You heard me,”_  he’d told Steve, both of them delighted by this display of verbal audacity.  _“I said, ‘goddamn pikers.’”)_

So Theseus sets sail under a wavering banner of black, along with the other thirteen luckless men and women who have been chosen to die alongside him. None of their names are mentioned in the story, because that doesn’t really matter either.

Which is, in the end, what the letter with its readily-duplicated format tells James Buchanan Barnes as he sits there: 

If he does not go, should he fail to report as so politely asked, somebody else will be sent in his place.

(There’d been one more thing in the story – about a trick Theseus uses to find his way out of the Minotaur’s lair, or rather the trick somebody else comes up with – but the particular details of this part escape him at the moment.)

But who would they send, then? 

James wonders. The greengrocer who sells him apples, and always tells that joke about finding tarantulas inside a bunch of bananas? The tailor who alters his suit jackets, and walks around with pins stuck in his mouth so that he has to mumble everything? The barber who cuts his hair, the cab driver who wears a lucky rabbit’s foot around his wrist, the boy who’d sat three desks behind him in grammar school?

Or Steve, maybe. 

Once they get desperate enough, maybe they’ll finally take Steve – Steve Rogers of the carefully-sharpened charcoal pencils and the baggy pants and the heart all scarred-up by rheumatic fever, Steve Rogers of the indefatigable loyalty and the outsized courage and the burden of things he feels compelled to prove. 

They’ll have to send him home in a coffin padded with newspaper, James thinks, like shipping a vase or an expensive hat, because he’ll probably be too small for whatever standard sizes they’ve got on hand over there. 

(They shouldn’t need to put anything in James’s coffin, though. He will be a good fit, assuming he’ll still be in one piece; he’s heard certain jokes made about matchboxes.  And even those collected pieces may not be his, entirely, because once the German bombs are finished with a platoon it can be difficult to tell who’s who.) 

The kitchen is suddenly too bright. A beam of sunlight from the window, which falls cleanly across the back of his neck, is suddenly too hot.

James puts his head in his hands. 

He closes his eyes. The darkness he finds behind them seems to pulse with the afterimage of colors, words, lines that refuse to take on solid shapes before they fade.

_(“King Aegeus stood watching on the cliff, as he had every day since Theseus’s departure, and from a long ways off he saw black sails appear on the horizon.”_

They hadn’t made any jokes about this part.  

_“Full of mistaken sorrow and despair, the king threw himself down into the sea which has ever afterwards borne his name – for Aegeus believed he had lost the one whom he loved most in all the world.”)_

James is still sitting like this when he hears the front door open. There is a quick shuffling noise, shoes being wiped on a mat. 

“…Buck?” Steve calls. “You here? Door’s unlocked.”

“Uh. Yeah.” He lifts the hands away from his eyes, and is satisfied to discover that both are dry. “I’m right here.”

Then Bucky stands up from his chair, tucks the letter into a back trouser pocket, and goes along the hallway greet him.

(But there has been an accidental miscasting of roles, it would seem. 

And had he kept his eyes shut a little longer, he would’ve likely managed to see something after all – a single bright thread, laid out through the dark labyrinth for him to follow, so that he might eventually find his way back from wherever it is they are sending him.)

…


End file.
